WaPo reports on the back of its A section Saturday that

An Interior Department scientist returned to work Friday, six weeks after he was suspended in connection with a probe of whether he improperly assisted another polar bear researcher in obtaining a federal contract….

Monnett was being investigated for improperly helping a researcher at Canada’s University of Alberta draft a response to a federal request for proposals on a polar bear study. Monnett chaired the committee that eventually awarded the contract to the university.

In the letter, the special agent in charge quotes the contract officer as saying that if Monnett had informed her about his collaboration with the University of Alberta researcher, “she would have warned you that such actions would have been highly inappropriate under procurement integrity policies and procedures.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz wrote in an e-mail that Monnett “was informed that he will have no role in developing or managing contracts of any kind, and will instead be in our environmental assessment division.”

Because, apparently, integrity is not so much a concern there.

Although I do think I recall other such problems arising when such foxes guard the hen house. Oh, yeah, then there was this, too. Er, and this. A whole pattern of isolated incidents.

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In my Big Journalism piece, “How an Enviro-Advocacy Group Propped Up Global Warming in the MSM – A Nov 2 Election Connection” I described how the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase is a viral accusation against global warming skeptic scientists. The beauty of the phrase is its simplicity and powerful influence, even when people misstate organizations associated with it. Al Gore disciples say global warming is a proven fact, all scientists know this, but a minority received massive energy industry funding to say the science isn’t settled.

The phrase is prominently seen in Gore’s movie, full screen in red letters for six seconds, followed by a slide of a very old cigarette advertisement as a setup for the next slide where Gore quoted a supposedly leaked tobacco industry memo, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.”

Gore didn’t identify the origins of the “reposition” phrase in the movie, so errors occurring when it was repeated it are understandable. I’ve seen offbeat errors where blog writers say the phrase came from “a surgeon general”, that it was “a leaked government memo”, that it is part of  “a movement by politicians to reposition global warming”, or that it was “memos circulated by some of today’s oil companies.”

But Gore himself said this, in a 2008 YouTube video, starting at the 29:10 point,

Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’

This is inexplicably contradictory to the book version of his movie – although it takes one additional step to understand why - when he says in reference to:

…a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies…. One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.

As I pointed out in my July American Thinker article, Gelbspan is neither the discoverer nor a Pulitzer winner, and a careful examination of his 1997 book The Heat is On reveals he specifically said the “reposition” phrase came exclusively from the 1991 Information Council on the Environment (ICE) public relations campaign, created by group of utility and coal industries.

Utility and coal, not oil – or oil industry associations.

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As the anniversary of his Waterloo — ClimateGate — unfolds this week, Al Gore is back and in classic form. In yesterday’s HuffPo, he fulminates on his hobbyhorse, right from the title: The Media Has Failed in Covering the Climate Crisis.

Busted clock, meet correct time; blind pig, meet acorn. Gore is right. If not exactly as he intends, yet again (for example, as the UK High Court admonished him for fudging about, there is indeed a link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperature…the opposite of the one he claims that everyone not paid to lie by oil companies knows to be the case). The media haven’t said nearly enough about the UK High Court pantsing his movie with some pretty tough language from a guy wearing a powered wig, for one. Then there’s the strange U.S. media allergy to exploring, vs. trying to wave away, ClimateGate.

But consider also when Gore appeared on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago. After boasting that he was the recipient of a huge bag of money to re-brand as the ‘climate crisis’ what we had just gotten used to calling ‘climate change’ (which had already been rebranded from global cooling, then global warming and before that, I believe, weather), Lesley Stahl asked of his “huge, new $300 million advertising campaign“, “how are you paying for this?”.

Unaccustomed to challenge, this man who keeps the media away from him so he doesn’t have to answer such silly questions trotted out some weasel-wording about passing through profits from his movie to his new endeavor, which stumbling harkened back to his “no controlling legal authority” days (still lacking the dexterity of “I never inhaled” by Bill “Bring More of Those Funny Brownies!” Clinton).

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“Waiting for ‘Superman’” is not only the most important documentary made in many a year but it might also help to restore a little of your faith in humanity, and I’m not even talking about the movie itself, which I’ll get to in a bit. I’m talking about its creator Davis Guggenheim, best known for directing and winning the Oscar for Al Gore’s alarmist global warming screed “An Inconvenient Truth.” In an era when, in order to hold on to power and take control of our lives, the Left tells Big Lies just as quickly as they can make them up, along comes Guggenheim, an acknowledged pro-union liberal, to take on the most powerful, and in my opinion destructive, special interest group in America: the national teachers union.

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Whatever his personal beliefs were as he began the process of documenting the fate of five children whose very futures rest on the less-than 10% chance of being accepted into a charter school, in the end Guggenheim risks the grave sin of apostasy as he courageously bucks the left-wing narrative to present a heartbreaking and damning exposé of the American public school system.

Had the exact same film been brought forth by a right-winger it would have had zero chance of creating any kind of national debate, much less change. But coming with Guggenheim’s clout and left-wing bona fides, there’s a chance his noble effort could spread a Road to Damascus virus among those who have for too long turned a blind eye towards an indefensibly immoral system propped up at the expense of children. Armed with facts and actual inconvenient truths, “Superman” deconstructs every lie told by politicians, union officials and bad teachers in defense of a status quo that destroys as many, if not more lives than drugs or gangs. (more…)

In the wake of yesterday’s terrorism outside Washington, DC by Discovery-network hostage-taker James J. Lee, let’s consider the position articulated by, say, radio host Glenn Beck to not attribute responsibility to Al Gore’s eco-ranting. The latter is of course larded with assurances of a certain eco-catastrophe brought about by dark forces impeding salvation, and disturbing utterances like “the tide in this battle will turn only when the majority of people in the world become sufficiently aroused by a shared sense of urgent danger to join in an all-out effort.” (Earth in the Balance, p. 269)

Any sane person knows that such exhortations for an all-out effort to stop urgent danger are merely calls to get involved, say with direct mail campaigns and bake sales.

Now, both Fox News and CNN have reported that Lee attributed his radicalism to the writings of two men — Daniel Quinn and Al Gore. The Washington Post carried a fairly lengthy article exploring the former, who dismisses any connection. That piece and the main news feature are both silent on the deceased’s giving equal credit to Gore (although a pop-up ad for China’s solar industry does accompany one of them). This is true of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage, among others.

Beck’s (somewhat backhanded, I understand) rationale for exculpating Gore of partial responsibility is that the terrorist was not a sane person. Yep. But the two — culpability by Gore and other radical green imams, and acting out by mentally unstable members of their targeted demographic — aren’t mutually exclusive. We know that individuals bear responsibility for reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, both the instigator and the instigated.

One might not like the connection, what with environmentalism being as chic as a Che Guevara handbag, but you can’t deny it. Take the quiz, “Did Al Gore say it? Or was it the Unabomber?“. I dare you to score better than 50%. That should make you uncomfortable. Then read Lee’s manifesto, and really squirm at the similarities.

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American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten’s new line is, “suddenly, everyone’s an education expert.”

She first trotted this phrase out in response to a positive review of the upcoming documentary film, “Waiting for Superman,” posted on the liberal Huffington Post.  Produced by the director of Al Gore’s, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the new movie and the education reform movement has now breached the teachers unions’ Bastille: the American Left.

Weingarten’s objective seems to be to dismiss anyone outside of the Education Blob as little more than a naysayer who obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  She’s attempting to insulate herself and the education system from increasing criticism over spending habits and flatlining results.

From Weingarten’s recent AFT convention speech:

And I never thought that I’d see a documentary film about helping disadvantaged children in which the villain wasn’t crumbling schools, or grinding poverty, or the lack of a curriculum, or overcrowded classrooms, or the total failure of No Child Left Behind.

No, the villain was us.

Look, I can take it. It’s part of my job.

But taking abuse shouldn’t be in the job description of more than 3 million public school teachers who work hard every day to do right by their students.”

She also dismissed the critics of the bloated system:

And I remain hopeful. Hopeful that we can overcome the formidable obstacles before us: an economy that has battered families and state budgets, an energized and concerted movement to tear down public service and public institutions, and a growing pundit class that has engaged in the browbeating of unionized teachers and public schools in other words, affixing blame rather than fixing schools.”

So to the Queen of Gall, I say this: yes, everyone IS an education expert.

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